


Something Beautiful

by surrexi



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: F/M, Fluff, Missing Scene, Vignette
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-20
Updated: 2011-12-20
Packaged: 2017-10-27 14:26:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,404
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/296817
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/surrexi/pseuds/surrexi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He wants to take her somewhere beautiful, and for once, the TARDIS takes him exactly where he wants to go.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Something Beautiful

**Author's Note:**

> A one-shot I wrote in early 2009 inspired by the quote at the beginning of the piece and by my desire to write some Nine for a change. Beta'ed as always by my dear friend Nikki, without whom I would be lost. The only warning can be for brief instances of shaky science made up on the strength of one Wikipedia article ;)

_“But more wonderful than the lore of old men and the lore of books is the secret lore of the ocean.”_  
\- HP Lovecraft

  
“So where are we, then?” Rose asks, an excited and curious smile fixed on her face. The Doctor loves it when she looks at him like this, like he’s a hero or a miracle worker, like he’s placed the whole universe at her feet and included a secret treasure map just for her to follow.

In a way, maybe he has, really. Here they are in a time machine, on an alien world she’s never seen before, would never have seen if he hadn’t burst into her life and blown it up, hadn’t let her pester him into helping, hadn’t taken her hand and run with her into danger instead of away.

He’s taken her to see her own planet’s destruction, because he’s selfish, and he needed her to _know_ , needed her to understand in some small way what he’d been though at the end of the Time War, even if he hadn’t been ready to give her the details. It was like he’d known right from the start how much she would invade his hearts and soul.

He’s taken her to the past to meet an author in the fading twilight of his life, maybe not on purpose but it still happened, and when it was over and he told her what would happen this nineteen-year-old girl from planet Earth managed to strike the proper balance between feeling for the man and not allowing the sad truth to weigh down her soul.

He’s taken her home and asked her to let him risk her very life to save the world, and grinned at her like a madman when she tells him to do it with not a hint of hesitation in her voice.

He looks back and it’s all been so historical. Sure, it was exciting while they were living it, but it’s almost dry in the retelling. Such serious events — the end of the world, a man’s last futile revival of the soul, a narrowly-avoided nuclear holocaust. She deserves something more _fun_ than that, something _brighter_.

Something beautiful.

He sets the coordinates accordingly and for once the TARDIS takes them exactly where he wants to go, when he wants to get there. He double checks when Rose asks, and beams before he tells her.

“Woman Wept,” he says, still grinning.

“Woman _Wept_?” she repeats, sounding slightly worried.

“It’s only called that because of the shape of the main continent, it looks like a woman, well, weeping,” he assures her. “Lamenting, even.” He pulls up a map on the TARDIS screen, and Rose looks reassured.

“What’s on Woman Wept?”

“Something beautiful,” he says enigmatically. “Get your coat. And a scarf,” he calls out as she scampers toward her room. “It’s cold out!”

Minutes later and he’s pushing open the TARDIS doors and relishing Rose’s gasp of surprise and wonder. She’s only been with him for a few months and he’s been measuring the success of his choice of destination by the sound she makes when he opens the door for most of them. This one rates pretty high on his internal scale of how much he’s impressed her, and his smile gets wide enough to reach his ears.

She glances back at him, and he gestures her on before turning to lock the TARDIS door behind them despite the fact that the cold beach is totally deserted except for them. Old habits, and all that.

She heads straight for the waterline — or, to be more precise, the _ice_ line. She doesn’t tiptoe around it, or stand there in disbelief. She steps with confidence onto solid ice, takes a few steps and gives a testing little hop. “It’s solid, yeah?”

He jogs the distance between them. “All the way through.”

“What, all the way to the bottom?” She takes his hand as if she doesn’t even think about it before she does it, and he likes it, likes that he’s becoming as much a part of her as she is a part of him, but he laces his fingers with her instead of clasping palms because he doesn’t think he’ll ever believe she needs him as much as he needs her. He nods in answer to her question.

“All the way,” he elaborates, pointing up at the sun. “Feel how weak it is? There was a massive rupture of magnetic flux tubes in the convective zone of the sun, caused by differential rotation. It resulted in an incredibly powerful reversed-polarity sunspot almost instantaneously. The planet was so cold that no one could live on it for some time, but now it’s warmed up enough that we can visit, but not enough to have melted the ice.”

Rose nods as if she understands. “Sunspots, yeah,” she repeats, because it’s one of the few things about the explanation for the frozen sea that she _does_ understand. She glances around again, at the waves frozen in mid-crash, the rolling hills and valleys further out. “Whatever happened, it’s beautiful now.” She reaches out and touches icicles hanging down from the crest of a wave and smiles up at him, her cheeks and nose going pink with happiness and chill.

“I want to show you something,” he says, and he tugs her further out to sea. They walk for a few minutes and then he turns, taking her parallel to the beach, around an outcropping of rocks toward a small cove.

They slip and slide over the slick surface of the frozen sea, and he thinks her laughter ringing off of the ice around them is like a Chopin prelude played by a virtuoso in the prime of his career. Then he thinks he’s getting far too sentimental, and he helps her back to her feet and tightens his grip on her hand. She says they should have brought ice skates and he wishes he’d thought of it.

“Maybe next time,” he says, and she beams back at him. He promises himself there will be a next time.

They reach the cove and he points her in the right direction. “Right over there,” he says, letting go of her hand and giving her a small nudge against the small of her back.

She slides along the ice, not lifting her feet, and after a moment he hears that impressed sound of surprise he loves so much.

“It’s beautiful!” she exclaims for the hundredth time in the last few hours, but he just soaks it in and congratulates himself on finally picking somewhere that won’t just end up a stuffy historical event somewhere.

He crosses to her, his heavy boots allowing him to step as he pleases instead of resorting to gliding along as she has. It’s less graceful, he thinks, but graceful is something he hasn’t been in quite some time. No, he’s all big ears and leather jackets and heavy boots and manic grins belied by stony eyes, the bass line counterpart to Rose’s graceful soprano laughter.

When he gets to her side, she slides her arm around his waist, under his jacket. Under his armor, if he’s being honest. She cuddles against him, looking down at the blurred palette of colors below their feet and smiling beatifically.

“It’s coral,” he says by way of explanation. “Because of the cove, the water was calm here when the freeze happened. There’s just underlying currents to blur the edges a bit, but the color of the coral underneath shows through.”

Rose nods and just stands with him for a moment, her gaze focused on the display below them and her arm firm around his body, as if she’s recording the whole memory — visual and tactile together — somewhere deep in her mind so she can take it out and savor it again later, like a favorite film or novel.

“Thank you,” she says after a moment. She turns her body so she’s facing him, inches away, hands resting on his hips underneath his jacket, thumbs hooked in the belt loops of his jeans.

He pulls her into his arms and hugs her tightly, and maybe it’s really him who’s recording the memory to be savored later, except his eyes are closed and he doesn’t care where they are, he just cares that she’s here and she’s happy and she’s _his_.

“You’re welcome, Rose,” he says against her hair.


End file.
